Rural Studio, founded in 1993, is a satellite school of Auburn University whose mission is to educate the “citizen architect”—to teach architecture students design and building skills along with the ethical and social responsibilities of the profession . To date, Rural Studio has completed about 120 private and public projects. Among these is the $20K House, a research project that aims to address the dearth of affordable housing in Hale County (in western Alabama) and represents a broadening of the school’s scope and potential impact. Forty percent of the region’s nearly 6,500 residents are eligible for federal housing loans, but few can manage loans over twenty thousand dollars; many, often elderly or disabled, live in trailers, whose value and quality depreciate precipitously. In an attempt to ameliorate this situation, every year since 2005 a new group of Rural Studio students has designed a house that can be built for twenty thousand dollars and is a potential model for low-income rural housing. So far nine designs have been drafted (one a year, except in 2007–08, when four were developed in tandem) and built by the students with help from their instructors.

Informed by their predecessors, the 2008–09 team has come closest to creating a viable prototype. After nearly a year of design development, client presentations, and critiques the house was distilled to the most elemental details, minimizing cost and accelerating construction time. Set on a pier foundation, the six-hundred-square-foot house—the home of Hale County resident David Thornton—is open inside except for a core that neatly encloses the bathroom and separates the bedroom from the rest of the space. The result is an airy, well-ventilated space suited for the extremes of Alabama’s climate. Dave’s House is the first $20K House built by a local contractor in real time, a step toward formalizing a repeatable model and a new paradigm for low-income rural housing.

Rural Studio is based in Newbern, Alabama, as a design/build workshop of the Architecture School of Auburn University. It was founded in 1993 by architects Samuel Mockbee and D. K. Ruth to educate architecture students in practical work that would have a long-term positive impact in the underserved communities of rural western Alabama. Since it’s founding it has completed more than one hundred projects, from housing and communal facilities to sports fields and community centers. Following the death of Samuel Mockbee in 2001, Rural Studio is lead by Andrew Freear, who graduated from the Architectural Association in London in 1994.

Dave’s House is a variant of Frank’s House, a design by the 2005–06 team. Both designs interpret the shotgun house—a narrow, rectangular home with a door at both ends—a style once popular in the American South. Through systematic observation and conversations with the owner of the older house, the 2008–09 team homed in on several issues: one of Frank’s House’s two porches is largely unused; its interior is completely open (curtains separate the bedroom and bathroom from the rest of the house); and the corrugated-tin exterior is perceived by neighbors as ramshackle and impermanent. The elegant white pine porch mitigates this perception in Dave’s House.

Due to the project’s limited budget, experimental mockups were essential to the design process and to allow for rapid construction—another directive of the project. These porch studies were used to test various arrangements and aesthetic details for the home’s front porch. The team also made a full-scale mock-up of the porch with the materials that were eventually used in the final iteration. Throughout their design development, they conducted a number of other full-scale experiments, taping out the floor plan and simulating walls with sheets of insulation foam.